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Pioneering Healthcare @ Home | Vaibhav Tewari @ Portea Medical
300 Plays3 years ago
With one of the world's largest ageing populations, the eldercare market in India is estimated to be worth $5 billion. But still, a substantial chunk of this sector remains disintegrated and unorganised.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt talks with Vaibhav Tewari, Co-founder and CEO of Portea Medical. He is an alumnus of IIM Calcutta with more than two decades of experience in building new businesses across different industries.
In India, many corporate hospitals provide top-class health care services but post-discharge care for patients was left an untrodden path. To address this gap, Portea Medical was started in 2013. It is a first-of-its-kind in providing affordable in-home medical services for patients, with a presence in over 30 cities across the country.
Tune in to this episode to hear Vaibhav speak about how Portea is leading the home healthcare segment with its unique bouquet of services.
What you must not miss!
- Portea Medical’s go-to-market strategy.
- Customer acquisition strategy.
- Virtual engagement with patients.
- Challenges faced by Portea.
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencastr and the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:00
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Before we start today's episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Zencaster, which is a podcaster's best friend. Trust me when I tell you this, Zencaster is like a Shopify for podcasters. It's all you need to get up and running as a podcaster. And the best thing about Zencaster is that you get so much stuff for free. If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link, zen.ai slash founder thesis.
00:00:27
Speaker
That's zen.ai slash founder thesis. Hi, I am Baba Thewari. I'm co-founder and CEO at Portia Medical.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurabh. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Overview of India's Healthcare Market
00:01:05
Speaker
Healthcare in India has always been a large and appealing market for startups. On the one hand, India's government-run healthcare infrastructure is nowhere near what developed countries have. And on the other hand, India is the world's second most populous country, which makes it obvious that there is a large, unaddressed market here.
00:01:27
Speaker
And this makes the sector extremely competitive with a lot of startups fighting it out.
Portia's Role in Home Healthcare
00:01:32
Speaker
But there is one category which has a clear leader and that is the health care at home category. Portia is a pioneer in the health care at home category with its thousands of employees serving patients at their homes across the country. Portia provides both in-home care through an attendant and also medical equipment on rent.
00:01:53
Speaker
and they have been one of the pillars of India's response to COVID, helping states to fight overcrowding at hospitals. In this fascinating conversation, Vyavav Tiwari, the CEO and co-founder at Portia, talks about the journey of building up Portia to make it the clear market leader that it is today and the way forward.
00:02:19
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
Healthcare Trends in India and Portia's Founding
00:02:40
Speaker
The whole idea was that if you look at healthcare and this started in late 2013, at that time, the corporate hospitals were fairly prevalent in India. Apollo, of course, had started that and fairly large number of good hospitals were there on tier one cities, many tier two cities also. And that basically meant that Indian consumers were willing to pay for good quality healthcare, right?
00:03:01
Speaker
and many of these hospitals have world-class health care services. I mean you have enough and more medical tourism happening in India and the quality of health is exceptionally good in most of these large hospitals. But there was not equivalent quality health care outside the hospital and most of the
00:03:16
Speaker
care once you get discharged from a hospital was more mom and pop shops actually right. So then we looked at saying that can you provide the same world-class health care outside the hospital ecosystem and that was a genesis of Portia. So you get great health care when you go to a hospital when you get discharged from there and you are in the recovery phase or rehabilitation phase I think you require similar level of care but was not available in India. So that's how Portia got started.
00:03:41
Speaker
The goal was more to both services or products? Mostly around services. At that time, of course, a lot around services. Nursing, physiotherapy, physiotherapy attendant, doctor at home, like the whole family doctor concept, right? I mean, we used to have family doctors earlier. Can you have that concept back with patients? And that's how it got started.
00:03:59
Speaker
In fact, we are the first company to take physiotherapy out of clinics and into patient homes.
Portia's Service Expansion and Innovation
00:04:04
Speaker
What was happening before that, people went to a doctor and doctor said that you need physiotherapy and then they get physiotherapy done in a hospital or a clinic. In our case, we basically started physiotherapy and saying, you can call us first, you can consult with us.
00:04:16
Speaker
And if only physical therapy helps, you can do physical therapy and then go and see the doctor if the problem is bigger than that. And so physical therapy became a B2C service in many ways after Portia came into existence. And like a lot of other things also, whether on nursing side or so, what happened in that, of course, a lot of focus at that time was around building post-operative care out of hospital care. But over a period of time, basically every segment got created, whether it's elder care, whether it's chronic disease management. So if you look at
00:04:44
Speaker
There are four key segments outside the hospital. You have post-operative care, you have primary care, you have elder care, and you have chronic disease management, diabetes, and things like that. And in seven years from then, we built solutions in each of these areas. So the whole idea was that when I get into a patient home with one service which they require, can I take care of all of their health care needs and their family's health care needs, actually? So patient became center of your existence, and then you say what solutions you can build around that.
00:05:14
Speaker
So everything which we created also came by patient demand only. We are doing medical equipment, we are doing diagnostics. You name any service which can be done at home. In fact, today we are doing ICUs at home. We are doing peritoneal dialysis at home. You name it actually. As complex as setting up a full-fledged ICU at home.
00:05:31
Speaker
to basically providing an attendant to support somebody for an act of daily living. The complete range of services are being provided and all of those requirements came from patients. They said, okay, can you guys do this? Can you guys do that? And that's how the whole growth
Marketing and Partnerships
00:05:46
Speaker
happened. This is the patient and the market feedback. What was the go-to-market offering like? When you initially launched, what was that version one like? If you ask me what was business plan, we wrote was all around nursing visits and doctor visits.
00:05:59
Speaker
And of course, doctor visits took its time to pan out. So what in the first two to three years, I think the main services were nursing at home, were physiotherapy and nursing attendant. And then medical equipment got added. Specialty Pharma got added. Diagnostics got added.
00:06:15
Speaker
Then, of course, last three years, diabetes management got added. So that's how the genesis has been. ISU critical here, we started a couple of years back, which has been a big positive. What is specialty pharma? Specialty pharma, what happens at Glauvin, some of the large MNCs, they launch an innovative molecule, right? So that innovative molecule doesn't get distributed through the regular channel. So what happened that if like these are basically drugs for
00:06:38
Speaker
cancer and hemophilia and things like that. So what happens in this case, those companies will market it directly to the doctors. So doctor will prescribe it and then the patient will call us directly and then we go and deliver that. So it's not like for your OTC or that prescription type of medication is basically high end.
00:06:55
Speaker
molecules so that's what we do so it needs to be administered under supervision yes i mean yes yes it can be by and these are basically things which are still not these are basically in this you know it is something which is new so it's not in large scale mass scale production at that
00:07:11
Speaker
In the early days, what was your customer acquisition strategy? So in the beginning of course when we started the whole idea was to get to some of the large hospitals and tie up with them because it was a new concept and the whole idea was that when you work with some of these well-known hospitals saying that okay we can partner with you and for your patients you can provide care. So of course it's a
00:07:32
Speaker
It's a great validation for our services and luckily we had many of the large chains and ourselves actually and we started working with them. Of course we also did large scale digital marketing. So we did Facebook campaigns, Google campaigns. We ran fairly sizable campaigns at that time. We also did a TV campaign in 2016 which was basically the
00:07:53
Speaker
first of its hand on home care. We did a lot of below-the-line marketing. We ran a train in Bombay with our full branding, actually. One of the first metros in Bombay ran with our full branding. We did a lot of branding in daily metros and so on and so forth. So we ran very sustained campaigns, digital as well as outdoor and TV for first three to four years with sizable investment. Because one is that you have to create the category that home care is possible professionally, and second also you have to create the brand. So I think we did that.
00:08:22
Speaker
And then roughly you could say that over a period of time, half of our business comes from what we call B2B2C, hospital, doctors, corporates, pharmaceutical companies. Anybody in healthcare ecosystem where our capabilities are leveraged. And other half comes from B2C, which is more direct to consumers.
00:08:40
Speaker
And how did you source the supply for it, like these attendants or nurses
Adapting Post-COVID-19
00:08:44
Speaker
or doctors? Are they like gig workers or are they on your payroll? Most of the people in the first four to five years were all on our payrolls because as you're building this industry and the way you train people, quality standards, all that have to be maintained very well. And just think about it. In our case, neither the employees are in the office, nor the customers are in the office. So we have to basically make sure that
00:09:04
Speaker
Engagement on both sides is exceptionally critical and both has to happen virtually, right? So that's something which is very important and that's why it was very critical for us to get the first set of employees on our roles. So first five to six years, we had most employees on our roles. In the last couple of years, especially post-COVID, we have like a fair mix of consultants and full timers.
00:09:24
Speaker
And even the processes are set now, we know what it takes to drive the best quality and so on and so forth. So that I think we are getting more and more success also. So right now, maybe around four and a half to five thousand people are there supporting patients. So how do you do virtual engagement? So two, three things we did, of course. All our clinicians carry a mobile app.
00:09:43
Speaker
So most of them carry the Android app, where all the visits are given using the app. Their case files are created using the app and things like that. So that's something which has been there right from the beginning. We developed our own ERP system, which we can use to basically run the whole distributed workforce. And patient engagement, of course, happened using the web app, as well as, of course, extensive interaction using other medium as well.
00:10:10
Speaker
But and also the main thing I think for us also is that from clinician perspective, how do you engage with them when they are at patient home and many of our clinicians are at patient home for years together also? And how do you basically engage with them? How do you make sure that they are continuously trained actually? So we did a lot of idea-based training. We have created on-the-job training where a trainer will go to the patient home also. Now, of course, in last year or so, it has become
00:10:33
Speaker
lot more digital driven. I think that's the big big big shift which we are seeing in last six to nine months for us as an organization. But before that all the you can call it omni-channel strategy we use to basically engage with both the connections and the patient and that is held at us in good state. At least we got the model right in ways in multiple ways and almost 25 percent of our new patients come from patient referral today. So that has been a big positive. I mean given that they have good they have good experience and they refer
00:11:03
Speaker
other patients as well. So that's what has been the big focus for us. And we have been very open about learning from patient and accepting feedback, good or bad. In fact, on Facebook also for many years, we had feedback from day one, whatever feedback was there, we had everything posted, we didn't know anything. And some people read the very old one and saying, okay, this is a problem you had, I said we had the problem three years back. And we are open to the fact that if I am doing, we spend what's close to 1,50,000 visits to patient home every month.
00:11:33
Speaker
And if I'm doing 150,000 visits, of course, some percentage of that will not necessarily be the best thing, experience-wise, whether it's expectation mismatch or otherwise. And we're very, very open to accepting that and working on it, and very transparent and honest about it. That's something. And it has helped us a lot because we could accept the feedback and work on it. I think we have continuously grown from a quality perspective, process perspective,
00:11:58
Speaker
and in many ways the benchmark of home care today because of that only because we listen to the patient and we act on the feedback good or bad even if they give good feedback we say what have we done differently in this and if they're bad feedback what went wrong in this and both has goes into like continuous process improvement.
00:12:15
Speaker
that business of coupons you realized your timing was off. What do you think about your timing for this?
Portia's Strategic Collaborations and Government Partnerships
00:12:20
Speaker
Has it been spot on or have you missed the timing in some areas? What is that learning which you carried forward? I mean, I guess history is always written in Red Cross, but I would say that
00:12:33
Speaker
But Portia, I think we have been, the right time, right place, I could say that. I think we got enough time. The most important thing in healthcare, of course, is credibility. So you have to build a brand. And from day one, we are very clear that we want to build a large B2C kind of brand, because that's what can make the real change on the ground. And that's something which we have invested time in.
00:12:56
Speaker
And first four to five years, of course, went into learning a lot of things, getting the business model right, getting the SOPs right, getting the unit metrics right. But we have the sheer massive experience behind us right now. As I say, we have served over a million patients so far.
00:13:13
Speaker
and have built models on how to build a big city, how to build a mid-side city, a small city, and how to get the right hybrid model right. So when the whole advent of health techs in the last couple of especially during COVID times, given that we have the massive learning behind us of five to six years before that, we could just
00:13:31
Speaker
innovate on our feet. I think that's, if you look at from a Portia perspective, I think the biggest differentiator is that we have been innovating on our feet actually and continuously ahead of the curve of what is possible and how can we support the patient. I think that has been the biggest differentiator for the organization.
00:13:51
Speaker
I'll give you an example. For example, COVID times, I'll give this an example we all are very proud of. So the last year when COVID hit first wave and that time nobody knew what to do. And then government started looking at how we can do, can patients, not everybody needs to go to hospital, can we do home isolation? And we along with Delhi government created the first program for home isolation.
00:14:09
Speaker
which was first of its kind and it was done totally in virtual environment because everybody was working from home at that time and the whole government machinery we could work with completely virtually could create that whole thing ground up
00:14:25
Speaker
in like three weeks flat, SOPs right, models right, working with different teams right. And that home isolation program was created and launched on May 1st. And then through those six, seven months till October, November, last year, until almost January this year, we ran home isolation for six state governments with almost a lot of districts covered, over four lakh patients. And all this was created
00:14:49
Speaker
in that sense on like really with like with no time totally virtually getting so many stakeholders together to build this at peak of that we had almost 1500 or so healthcare workers and doctors and people and paramedical staff working
00:15:04
Speaker
from their homes across the country and supporting these patients, actually. So it's first of its kind, I think. Even worldwide, this was first of its kind. I think it was covered by HBR also as a healthcare innovation by public sector in India. And that was a great innovation. Of course, that got us thinking into how to leverage health tech more and more, actually. And that, of course, everything changed in the last year and a half after wave one. So what really demonetization did for digital payments is what COVID has done for healthcare.
00:15:34
Speaker
and home care as well. What exactly was this platform that you did with the government? Like people could isolate at home and through a mobile app interact? Yes, of course, now anybody does that. But at that time, people didn't know what to do. I mean, if I test positive for COVID, what should I do? So we created the SOPs with government, where we said that anybody who tests positive, you look at the early symptoms of the patients and demographic and so on and so forth. And based on that, we decided whether they can be treated at home or not.
00:16:02
Speaker
And if they can be treated at home, they don't need to rush to hospital because you already started rushing to hospital. Your hospital can't take the load. So then almost 90 and at that time, almost 85 to 90 percent patients could be treated at home. So that data comes to us. And then we have a team of health care workers and doctors who talk to these patients regularly and basically treat them at home using teleconsultation.
00:16:24
Speaker
So it was totally, it's a large tele-consolidation program. And of course, we had a treatment plan. So we basically, we have a robust software for treatment plan management. And on that, we put every patient and then we'll talk to them, what readings are there, what is SPO2, what are other underlying conditions and eco-morbidities. As for the SOP, you basically manage them. And if somebody's condition is now worsening, you take them to the hospital in basically
00:16:48
Speaker
consultation along with the government agencies because ambulance has to come and at that time of course now it's much easier but last year it was not that easy right so basically you work with the government you work so all the teleconsultation all the patient management is done by us out of on-ground support was provided by the government and together we could basically take care of these patients so i think less than three percent patients were hospitalized are the list which came to us
00:17:09
Speaker
And I mean, we had really, really hard-touching stories in that. I mean, there's a pregnant lady in Delhi, whom she was in labor and, of course, quite positive. And I'm talking of May-June last year. How do you make sure that ambulance goes there and she goes to hospital and she delivers in the night also.
00:17:26
Speaker
and successfully so all those like and the many stories like that and of course, COVID has shown us like all the positive side of people also in the country. So this was a like paid by patient or paid by government? Paid by government actually is all this was funded by government, a fundamental government along with some of the CSR funds, I think combination of
00:17:44
Speaker
But government was exceptionally proactive at that time. I mean, we really had a great experience working with various state governments and that kind of urgency with which they came around making sure that patients are taken care of and we could handle this crisis together was really, really eye-opening.
00:18:03
Speaker
How did the handoff happen from like say a government testing center to Portia? So they will basically the first list will get done, they will look at the list with their doctors or with their nodal officers and that list will get transferred to us in our system and then our team will start working on that list and then of course the government set up a set of doctors who are available including their chief medical officers and all and of course we had our medical team led by our president of medical services and
00:18:30
Speaker
And we managed this and then your team would like to do daily calls, get information, update that, give them advice, give them prescription. Do that, yes, then work with government, work on data, make sure that anybody who's basically not in the, who's basically deteriorating, how do you go and work with them and make sure they're taken care of.
00:18:49
Speaker
large operations. Yeah, it sounds like a heavy ops kind of a task. Yes. And heavy ops, heavy medical, massive proactiveness you have to show every time something goes wrong. How do you make sure that you work together to make sure the patient is taken care of, I think. And the thing is that it's new. Nobody knew COVID at that time. Now we don't know. I mean, at that time we didn't know anything, right? So how do you handle an unknown enemy? I mean, that's like nothing was known. Now it looks like a story, but fact is at that time, exceptionally high amount of panic and how can we support patients?
00:19:18
Speaker
Did you face challenges as an organization in terms of manpower? Because I know a lot of companies faced that manpower crunch because people went back to their hometowns and things like that. Yeah, a little bit we faced actually. I mean, of course, what happened, many of the patients who were critical and most of them, we asked them, can we have the nurse and the attendant work with you 24 hours? Can they stay with you? I mean, of course, they will work whatever eight hours, nine hours they work, but rest of the time, can they stay with you?
00:19:44
Speaker
and most of the patients were very open to doing that. So what happened during that time, of course, is that your new supply of manpower from smaller locations didn't happen. So what happens in our case, nursing attendant, we worked with a lot of NSDC, that National Skill Development Counciling partners and those people moved to bigger cities, trained by us and by the NSDC, of course. So that supply got stopped in the middle because people are not traveling and trains were stopped and lockdowns and so on and so forth.
00:20:09
Speaker
But people were there, some of them went back, but I think most of the people stayed around and we could sustain that quite well. We didn't see any crisis because of shortage of manpower. What are the levers of this business? Is it more about building supply or building demand? And supply here would be manpower, right? I'm guessing the key ingredient of supply.
00:20:30
Speaker
I think the most important thing in this business to build credibility and build the right quality of service. I think if you ask me, the biggest lever is that because Indian consumer and patients are very patient, quote unquote. Once they know that you're also trying your best and any service which is human led, you know that things have to be managed well, right?
00:20:54
Speaker
So I think if you can build the credibility and you are giving 100% and 110% to support patients, I think that's the biggest lever to build this business. And on top of that, if that becomes your core, then everything else is possible from there. Of course, you have to build a supply. You have to make sure that regular stream of people is coming to you, getting trained the right way, having the right attitude towards supporting patients. Supply, of course, is one key part of it.
00:21:17
Speaker
And of course, in demand generation, make sure that you're working with the right channels to make sure that their credibility and quality becomes very important because a doctor or a hospital will not refer you, refer their patients to take home care from you if your quality is not good, right? So it's like that. So on both sides, and you will not get good people to work with you if you're not having the right brand and credibility. I think that becomes the core of it.
Employee Development and Future Plans
00:21:41
Speaker
And then of course, the supply side, you have to continuously work on increasing the pipeline, creating this as a career option. I mean, most important thing is this is not a career option. So in many of these things, home care, even for nurses, philanthropists, it has become a good career option now. People are continuously looking at how they can be in this segment now.
00:21:59
Speaker
What are the initiatives you've taken to build supply? Yeah, so what have you got? We have done basically, we call used to call it corridors. So we basically work with multiple NSCC partners, in fact, all 70, 80 of them, and which region, which location, which village district they are able to get people from.
00:22:15
Speaker
And we have, in fact, we have gone to our teams, have gone to many of those locations. And how can you create corridors? I mean, people from Orissa to Bangalore, Orissa to Hyderabad, Jharkhand to Delhi, Jharkhand to Calcutta, Jharkhand to Bangalore. So we have seen people from different, different places in which all locations they can go to where they're just well and things like that. So working with them as partners, growing that, that something is important. Going to physical colleges, going to nursing colleges, doing pre-placement for them.
00:22:43
Speaker
making sure that we are able to move them moving people from northeast across the country. So we have basically each of the profiles we looked at how do we basically create this as a career option for them and then of course how do you continuously train them and work with them to grow them basically as professional how do you give them opportunities within the organization.
00:23:01
Speaker
and build their skills and grow. So what is the growth path for someone who joins as a nursing attendant? They can become field officers, they can become team leaders, they can become what we call level two attendance index. So you start with maybe like acts of daily living, you support, you could be a paid attendant to support dementia patients, Alzheimer patients. How do you take care of cancer patients actually? I mean, each of these things, the level of empathy you have to show is skills you need to have really very different.
00:23:28
Speaker
How do you become a team leader? I mean, some of our team managers are our attendants who started with us. Similarly on nursing side, I mean, people can become trainer, they can become subject matter experts, they can become managers. Again, most of our nursing managers are all nurses who work with us when they started with us.
00:23:45
Speaker
Similarly on physiotherapy, I mean, some of our biggest people who have grown the fastest in the organization were physiotherapists who joined us. I mean, they became product managers. I mean, in our case, what happens continuously innovate on the product side also, right? Right now we are working on digitalizing everything which we are doing. It's a massive product requirement with the product understanding. So I mean, many of these people only are building the next version of Portia, right?
00:24:09
Speaker
Essentially like the steps that they take, the workflow of care is getting put into an app and made like a checklist so that everything gets done. Yes. Yeah. That is one part. Second is that can you do video consults of physiotherapy? I mean, you are doing yoga online or you're doing gym online and for a neck pain, back pain, can we strengthen exercises? Can some of that can go online? Can you do digital part of that?
00:24:30
Speaker
And of course, as workflows, an important thing, can you do video consult for the patients for assessment? Suppose you are a physical therapist, you go to the patient home, you are doing the assessment, you can have SME on video consult with you. So the kind of support patient gets in that way, using technology, using digital, is exceptional. And that's something which you can create.
00:24:52
Speaker
So that's what we are building now. So every single step of our process can you digitalize and can you make sure that it's repeatable, scalable in that sense.
00:25:01
Speaker
And of course, it's long medical supervision. Other important point is medical supervision because teleconsultation is an accepted thing now. So how can you type medical supervision? What kind of people join you as consultants and what kind of people join us full-time? Is it their choice or do you slot people? Of course, it's their choice. Wherever we have demand, which is very, very predictable in those areas, of course, you prefer to have full-timers. The demand, of course, is like a little bit variable. We can have consultant or full-timers or part-timers.
00:25:28
Speaker
So is demand for attendance predictable? Because it sounds like there would be lots of peaks and troughs. There will be some actually of those, but you have X number of people who have surgeries every month. You have Y number of new mothers who come every, new babies born every month. So you have some predictability around it.
00:25:49
Speaker
Of course, it has its healthcare seasonality. So during festival season, nobody wants to go to the hospital. So you'll have some problems during that time. But January to March is the time when most of the people go for their surgeries and a lot of equipment demand is there for respiratory disease and all of those kinds of things. What do these people do during downtime? Is it like a holiday for them?
00:26:13
Speaker
Yeah, so it depends on, so I mean, those times the patient who needs it will continue to do that. And of course, the demand doesn't change like, so what happens is that the patients may go up or down actually, but a patient who requires it, they will continue to support the patient. So I mean, sometimes you'll do four visits a day, sometimes you'll do two visits a day and it averages four. I want to understand about the geographical expansion. Like when you started with cities, did you cover and how did you gradually scale that up?
00:26:35
Speaker
So when we started, we basically started with all the tier one and part of the tier two cities. So we started with the top seven metros, Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Chennai, and then some of the state capitals like Lucknow, Chandigarh, Indore, those kind of cities. And then there's around 16 cities we split for services and another four or five for equipment.
00:26:56
Speaker
and so around 20 cities we were in. We also tried four or five cities at that time with physiotherapy online demand of course that market didn't pick up so we had around 20 cities for first four five five six years then this year I think after home care has become front and center so there are two things which are driving our next three things actually which are driving ODR 2.0 or 3.0 whatever we want to call it I would say that
00:27:21
Speaker
the post-COVID scenario. One is that we are saying we go digital. So our motor noise, go digital, go 100. So one is that we go
Portia's Future in Digital Health and Home Care
00:27:29
Speaker
digital. That basically means that every single thing we do, we have to basically digitalize it. Patient interaction, operations, clinician interaction, everything as I was explaining to you, that's why everything has to go digital, which could be operational digitalizing as well as offering digital only services, digital-led services.
00:27:45
Speaker
Like point of care devices at patient home. Can I collect data? Can I have a complete medical layer and emergency layer for patient available all the times? Those kind of things. Can they use wearable devices? Can we support them with that actually? Second is expansion countrywide. So we said we'll get to 100 cities and we started adding cities as we speak. We are at 12 cities in last couple of months with very good results. So we're in 32 cities right now as we speak. Any city which is basically 7-10 lakh population range is what we want to enter.
00:28:15
Speaker
So that's there. And third, of course, is that every, so we also go deeper in the specialty solution which we provide. If I'm doing critical care, can you do oncocare? Can I do cancer care? Can I do ortho care? Can I do pulmonology care, right? So we've taken four or five verticals where we are building deeper solutions. I mean, if you see COVID, during COVID time, all the oncology patients were the most vulnerable to go to a hospital.
00:28:37
Speaker
And the whole ecosystem is looking at how can we support them at home? Pickline care, wound care, stoma care, all of that can be done at home. And that's something which we started building. And getting massive traction for that. So saying each of these things, can you provide deeper solutions, more specialist solutions at patient home? When today we run any of it in 100 to 120 ICUs at home.
00:28:57
Speaker
which includes a ventilator, bed, monitoring, doctor available, nurse on ground, the complete IC limits. It is like the hospital IC setup just created at home. So we are saying that can be also go deeper in those verticals. So those are three things which we are looking at growing. So cities which we recently launched are cities like your Mysore, Salem, Durgapur, Ranchi. We are starting Ludhiana, Nagpur, Bhuvneshwar.
00:29:20
Speaker
What do you think are trends which you think Portia is well positioned to capitalize on? Because Covid has obviously changed and there are trends emerging now. So what do you see as those trends which you think Portia is
00:29:36
Speaker
well positioned? I think there are two, three trends. One, of course, home care has become more front and center. And of course, we are the being leader. They are in a very good position to create value in that. Second, of course, the whole digital health care, the health tech piece of it. Can you do device-led health care services? The kind of data which you can collect with POC devices is something which is sizable. And acceptance of digital health care, right? Whether it's teleconsultation, weekly consultation, so on and so forth.
00:30:05
Speaker
I think that massive possibilities, the people awareness, the whole consumer behavior, the awareness about health has changed significantly. So there's tremendous need in the in the population for taking care of chronic disease, right? Taking care of being like being more careful about your health. So not more focus on preventive health care, right? So there are so many trends in each of these areas.
00:30:25
Speaker
Even you look at tier four, like rural area, I mean, so much more which is possible using technology, can you take healthcare to the rural area? Can you go to like tier four, tier five towns and rural area? All those are things which have opened up all of a sudden actually. So I mean, this like, of course need was always there, but with technology, it's much more ease, is much more possible to do today actually. So that's something which we are looking at how we can leverage technology and reach out to much, much larger population.
00:30:51
Speaker
And that's again something which I believe is a massive opportunity here. Yeah, I think digital connected devices sounds like the next big wave. Yeah, it is. And of course, it is tremendous. I think the big thing is that, of course, conceptually, it always makes sense. But fact is that you have patient acceptance that has changed significantly now.
00:31:09
Speaker
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00:31:30
Speaker
Before we end the episode, I want to share a bit about my journey as a podcaster. I started podcasting in 2020 and in the last two years, I've had the opportunity to interview more than 250 founders who are shaping India's future across sectors.
00:31:46
Speaker
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00:32:07
Speaker
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